Cannibal and victim share penis appetiser

Berlin - German police are watching home videos made by a sex cannibal.

The man apparently shared a last meal of flambéed penis with his willing victim before carving him up and freezing the man's remaining body parts to eat later.

Prosecutors in Kassel said on Thursday that the 41-year-old homosexual, who has confessed, was not being treated as insane.

Germany's more sensational newspapers were packed with lurid details.

Police arrested the man after he posted an Internet advert seeking another male volunteer to satisfy his appetites.

"We're watching the videotapes and searching his house.

"There are tapes," said a police official, who was combing the suspect's elegant, half-timbered home in the picturesque town of Rotenburg-an-der-Fulda, near Kassel, on Thursday.

They had already found frozen human flesh and bones, as well as video recordings of the exceptionally bizarre crime.

Prosecutors, who first announced the murder investigation on Wednesday, have named neither the victim nor the suspect, but German media have quoted investigators who identify the dead man as "Bernd Jörgen B" and the alleged killer as "Armin M".

A Kassel prosecutor, Hans-Manfred Jung, said: "He's in normal custody at the moment. He is regarded as capable of standing trial."

Changing details first released on Wednesday, prosecutors said the accused was 41 and the victim a 42-year-old man from Berlin. They believe that the killing took place in March last year.

Both men were computer technicians, German newspapers said.

"The deed appears to stem from cannibalistic and homosexual tendencies shared by both men," police said on Thursday in a statement so grisly in its detail that the nation's biggest selling newspaper, Bild, reprinted it word for word.

"The accused supposedly first cut off the penis of the victim by mutual agreement because they wanted to eat it together," the statement said.

Police declined comment on reports that the two first flambéed the organ in spirits, then, after tasting it, decided to fry it.

The suspect then killed his companion with deep cuts to the neck and chopped the body into pieces which he froze and later ate, prosecutors said.